Techcrunch's Duncan Riley has breathlessly reported that Australia is now joining the League of Evildoers by instituting a scheme to block illegal internet content - or, in his words, "The Australian Government has announced that they will be joining China as one of the few countries globally that broadly censor the internet".

The news has caused predictable outrage among the net's libertarians - but it strikes me that there's a fundamental flaw at the heart of such strong reactions.

Riley's underlying point - that censoring the internet is bad - isn't wrong, and it's a subject that we've talked about plenty before (most recently in a column about the Australian approach by Seth Finkelstein pointing out that censorware never works).

I am constantly torn over whether censorship has a place in society, but it's clear to me that the real problem is not the concept of the censor, but the situation where censorship decisions are made behind closed doors and become the only available option.

That's what happens in China - the firewall, like some sort of distant deity, is both ineffable and omnipresent. But under the proposals from the Australian government, nobody is forced to have blacklisted content blocked from their net connection. Doesn't implying otherwise undermine the fight against those who genuinely use online control in order to crush human rights?

Update: Duncan's taken the startlingly innovative leap of calling me a "commie" for suggesting that this situation isn't equivalent to China's great firewall. Obviously, that means he's ignored pretty much every link above and the actual comments I've made. To reiterate: this sort of inflated posturing doesn't convince anybody who isn't already converted to the anti-censorship cause; it's a sort of libertarian fundamentalism that doesn't go down well in meatspace.

And you might like to ignore the people there, but they're the majority.

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